TO HILL & BACK

Affectionately described as ‘almost certainly the toughest 10K in Britain’, the Knacker Cracker is 10K-‘ish’ of lung-busting, quad-wrecking fun. Steve Rencontre sheds some light on the New Year’s Day madness

Steve Rencontre

KNACKER CRACKER

You don’t have to be mad to run the Knacker Cracker, but... No, forget it, you do have to be mad to run the Knacker Cracker. When you could be at home, gently sleeping off your New Year’s Eve partying, instead you put on a silly costume and go to the top of Box Hill in Surrey. You do this in order to run down it, then back up it, then down the other side, back up, down again, up again, and finally – you guessed it – down and up again!

About Men's Running

When I first started at MR – a fresh-faced graduate with fully functioning knees – I ran to keep fit. Did I do it? Yes. Did I enjoy it? No.
Fast-forward two years and things are a little different... 2016 saw me run my first marathon, my first ultra and – the natural progression – my first 24-hour track race. People talk of the running bug, but this was a full-scale pandemic. In the months that followed, though, I got lazy. The thought of running elicited a vacant stare, a memory of plodding round a 400m track at three in the morning, and the muttered words, “You weren’t there, man.”
So, resolved to refind my running mojo in 2017, I signed up to a race, the Brixton 10K (p94), in the hope that it would spark me back to life. And, along with providing depressing confirmation of just how much slower I’ve got, it certainly did that; the post-race feeling reminding me just why I fell in love with running in the first place. For many, though, running’s true benefit lies not in racing but in the adventures it brings. In our lead feature this issue (p46), photographer James Carnegie leads us on
a whistle-stop tour of Northern Ireland to prove that, with just a little planning, a day is all you need to run some of the finest routes the UK has to offer. You may not find me scrambling up the Mourne Mountains any time soon, but you will find me running again. Here’s to getting back on track in 2017.